Other "Owen O'Malleys" on the net

My other pages

*Smile* I haven't updated these pages in years, except for the pages
of the kids. (See links above.) The web is a wonderful way of sharing
photos with a large collection of people.

Beth and I enjoy traveling quite a bit. We have been to Japan, Oregon,
the Carribean on two cruises, Pennsylvinia, Washington DC,
Hawaii, an Alaskan cruise, and various parts of California.

I like playing games of all types and have a group of gamers that play
games at lunch three or so times a week. We mostly play board games
such as "Settlers of Catan", "Through the Desert", "RoboRally",
"TileChess", "Streetcar", "Bohnanza", "Mama Mia", "Acquire",
"Ursuppe", "Torres", etc. I also play card games, such as Bridge,
Hearts, Spades, and "Oh Hell" when I can't get anyone to play a board
game. Sometimes, I'll host a game day on the weekend and we can play
longer games like the railroad games "Iron Dragon, Empire Builder,
Euro-Rail, etc.) I've even been known to play a computer game or two
("Civilization", "Alpha Centari", "Total Annihilation", "Asheron's
Call"), but playing games with friends is a lot more fun than playing
by yourself) so I don't tend to play them as much anymore.

Since I spend so much of my time inside, I like to get outside to do
physical stuff too. I enjoy hiking, road biking (The best was 2300
miles in 1994), scuba diving, sailing (UCI had 14 foot Lidos and 30
foot Shields that we could take out) and snow skiing (27 days in
94-95, why did I finish my PhD?). Occasionally, I'll even do a little
juggling (3 clubs or balls). Beth and I walking around Shoreline park
and hiking up with the trees in Big Basin.

I also read a lot of fiction, which mostly consists of science fiction
and fantasy, but I do read classics, action thrillers, philosophy and
religion books too.

Programming Languages:

I'm a professional program (since high school!) and I like learning
new programming languages. Here's the list of ones that I know well:

Python, which is a good high
level scripting language. It is similar to perl in speed and
scope, but is a much better designed language.

C++,
a really bad high level extension to a low level language. Unfortunately,
it is still the best choice for many applications that have performance
constraints.

Modula-3, which is a good compiled language. It has threads, optional
garbage collection and nice libraries.

Ada, it was a nice language,
but had some serious flaws. The language was too complex and it was
difficult for the compiler writers. On the other hand, the library was
far too small to be useful. Had threading and templates built in to the
language long before C++ added them, but the compilers were too
expensive.

Icon, which is a good
string processing language. At this point, I think you are better off with
Python.

Lisp, the classic language with a HUGE language definition. Has by
far the best polymorphism and dynamic dispatch capabilities.

I have also been exposed to Cobol, Fortran, Algol (60 and 68), APL and
various assembly languages (8080, 6502, MIX, PDP-11, 80x86).

Doing research in a formal methods group here at UCI, I've also been
exposed to several specification languages, such as:

Graphical Interval Logic (GIL)

Real-Time Interval Logic

Larch

Z

OBJ

ASLAN

StateCharts

Finally, I can create and modify elisp files (for emacs), latex style
files, and bibtex style files ( ugh in postfix! ) with the best
of them.

PhD in Information and Computer Science from University of
California, Irvine; Dec 1996; Advisor: Debra Richardson

My dissertation is on specification-based testing. In particular, I
focus on using formal specifications as oracles to determine whether
the results of a test case satisfy a specification. Besides the
formal specification and the program, you also need a representation
mappings between the specification and implementation that relates the
equivalent parts. These representation mappings relate the
abstract values in the specification to concrete values in the
implementation and enable comparisons between the two.

MS in Information and Computer Science from University of
California, Irvine; Jun 1989